Many computers, particularly portable computers such as laptop computers like Sony's VAIO®, can communicate wirelessly with one or more networks. For instance, a laptop computer may be capable of wirelessly communicating with a wide area network (WAN), wireless local area network (WLAN), a Bluetooth network, a short message service (SMS) network, and so on.
As critically recognized herein, each of the above networks typically has its own user interface (U/I) that a user must invoke to enable the particular communication channel or otherwise communicate over the associated network. For instance, a utility known as Windows Zero Configure (WZC) provides a U/I for communicating over WLAN, while another utility known as Windows Bluetooth Manager can be used for Bluetooth communication. Various familiar trademarked terms such as “Windows” may be used herein for convenience.
As further recognized herein, the various U/I of the wireless networks that are available on a computer are not integrated, meaning that a user wishing to switch from one network to another must access the different utilities associated with each network and operate each one to, e.g., configure system settings of a network, change which network is being used, etc. With this recognition in mind, the present invention is provided.